inly,
without any jingle, what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who
_can_ speak their thought, not to sing it; to understand that, in
a serious time, among serious men, there is no vocation in them for
singing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are charmed by it as
by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, and account it a
mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere
and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that it
is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is
a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple
_terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally
with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for
the essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth,
and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it musical;--go _deep_ enough,
there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls
an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all:
architectural; which also partakes of the character of music. The three
kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_, _Paradiso_, look out on one
another like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural
world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of
Souls! It is, at bottom, the _sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity,
here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It came deep out of
the author's heart of hearts; and it goes deep, and through long
generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when they saw him on the
streets, used to say, "_Eccovi l' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno_, See,
there is the man that was in Hell!" Ah yes, he had been in Hell;--in
Hell enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him
is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out _divine_ are not
accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labor of any kind, highest
virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black
whirlwind;--true _effort_, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free
himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are "to become perfect through
_suffering_."--_But_, as I say, no work known to me is so elaborated as
this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of
his soul. It had made him "lean" for many years. Not the general whole
only; every compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness,
into